Energy Department Updates Breach Count, Says 53,000 Affected

DOE offers employees a free year of identity theft monitoring services after hackers steal personal info, including social security numbers.

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The Department of Energy (DOE) has confirmed reports that it suffered a data breach in July that lead to the theft of employees' personally identifying information (PII).

"The department has now identified approximately 53,000 past and current federal employees, including dependents and contractors, whose name, social security number, and date of birth were compromised by this cyber incident," read a July 2013 Cyber Incident breach notification posted Friday to the DOE's public-facing website.

The July breach involved an outdated, publicly accessible ColdFusion system known as DOEInfo, which sources said hadn't been patched against known vulnerabilities. DOEInfo is an employee database owned and maintained by the agency's Office of the Chief Financial Officer.

"Based on the findings of the department's ongoing investigation into this incident, we do believe PII theft might have been the primary purpose of the attack," according to the notification. "Accordingly, the Department encourages each affected individual to be extra vigilant and to carefully monitor bank statements, credit card statements, emails and phone calls relating to recent financial transactions."

In a phone interview Tuesday, an agency spokeswoman said that all affected employees have been offered a free year of identity theft monitoring services.

As is standard practice, the DOE breach is being investigated by the agency's Cybersecurity office, the Office of Health, Safety and Security, and the Inspector General's office, as well as federal law enforcement agencies. "Once the full nature and extent of this incident is known, the Department will implement a full remediation plan," said the notification.

This doesn't sound very comforting: "If you do not receive a notification letter by September 15, 2013, you should assume it is unlikely your PII was affected," according to the notification. "If DOE later determines your PII was affected you will be notified, regardless of the date of discovery." All around poor breach handling.

53,000 individuals. $15/month for 12 months credit monitoring. That's $9.5 million (probably a bit less if they've negotiated a bulk discount), plus administrative costs. They don't have money to patch a known software vulnerability, but they have money to pay for credit monitoring? Oh, that's right. The taxpayers -- you and me -- will pay for this. Incompetence bordering on criminal. Do you trust these people to protect our nation's nuclear weapons designs? Oh wait... they've proven unable to do that as well.

53,000 affected individuals, $15/month, 12 months. That's over $9.5M in credit monitoring at list prices (probably less since they should get a little bit of a discount from what I'd pay as an individual), plus the cost of administering it. They didn't have money to patch known vulnerable software, but they have it to pay these fees (and any fines that individual states will pile on as well)? Oh, that's right. We taxpayers will pay that, not the

DOE's lack of transparency and double speak about this breach tends to reinforce the bad rap govt. gets on events like this.

As the DOE's answer to its own rhetorical question (above) suggests, "Department of Energy networks and employee information hosted on these networks are protected in accordance with federal laws and Department of Energy policies"-- except when they get hacked.

Hacks happen. But it's not very reassuring for DOE or federal employees in general to be told "We (DOE) are working with interagency partners on actions that can be taken against those responsible and to reduce the likelihood of another successful attack."

A year's worth of free credit monitoring is a steaming pile of dung. The DOE's incompetence would now require me to go thru the hassle of enrolling for the monitoring, monitioring it, having to go thru the hassle of getting reimbursed, then remembering to cancel it at the end of the year. Then I would be barraged by sales emails for as long as I owned the email address. I see more of these announcements coming as the govt ramps up Obama care.

Published: 2015-03-31The build_index_from_tree function in index.py in Dulwich before 0.9.9 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a commit with a directory path starting with .git/, which is not properly handled when checking out a working tree.